Physics

Newton’s discovery of the universal law of gravitation was the culminating moment of the scientific revolution, Man’s closest glimpse into the Mind of God. It is said that the apple fell to Newton from the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden itself.

I thought I understood this but the last several times I have thought it through I reach the same sticking point. I will paste in a typical layman explanation from a PhD in Physics below and respond with my questions. https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-a-clock-ticks-more-slowly-when-it-moves-at-a-higher-speed-Why Is it true that a clock ticks more slowly when it moves at [more …]

“Normal adults don’t stop to think about such concepts as space and time. These are things children ask about. My secret is I remained a child. I always ask the simplest questions. I ask them still.” — Einstein

That quote comes to my mind especially today, reading the headline: “Discovery of New Particle Could Redefine World”

So let us be like children now, just for a moment, and take time to think a bit about time, and space, and everything…

We always talk of matter as if it only had passing relation to electrical effects. Yet if we look in detail into the nature of matter, we find physical substances, made of molecules, made of atoms, made of positive and negative electric charge. Matter is not electrical? No, quite the opposite: electric charge is the major component of all atoms. Therefore matter is *made out of cancelled electric charge.* If we cancel out some opposite charge by placing positive charge together with negative charge, do we get NOTHING? No, instead we get material substance. Positive protons plus negative electrons equals neutral atoms. Physical objects normally have no charge? Wrong. The physical objects *are* the charge.

I believe the answer given by Paul Walorski here http://www.physlink.com/education/askexperts/ae86.cfm is incorrect in the statement, “The polarization of the first observed photon can be interpreted as nothing more than the measurement of a characteristic that was established back at the time both photons were created.” If it were true that “nothing more” than this is [more …]

Books, PhysicsComments Off on Reading The Lightness of Being by Frank Wilczek

Mar242011

An electron is a physical condensation of the electromagnetic field that permeates all of spacetime. Thus every electron has the same source. The electron is like the morning dew, appearing from and returning to “the thin air.” — Photons are not massless in a superconductor. They are heavy. Electromagnetic radiation does not penetrate superconductors. If [more …]

Light and energy, gravity and inertia; these are material mysteries. We cannot explain them. A mystery is not the same as a puzzle. A puzzle can be figured out. A mystery, in the religious sense, cannot. A mystery cannot be figured out, because it defies figuring. We have literally taken lightening out of the sky and made it to sing, yet in a very real sense, we have no real knowledge of it all.

Key concepts: Interference Patterns Defraction and Refraction Information Theory QED Holograms take advantage of some pretty amazing physics. For example, on a piece of holographic film, the entire image is recorded on every piece of the film. You can cut up the film into as many pieces as you like and it will still reproduce [more …]

This is the interpretation of Quantum Mechanics that you DONT hear about (the one that actually makes sense). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Broglie-Bohm_theory The “standard” interpretation is the “Copenhagen Interpretation” put forward by the Zen-minded Neils Bohr (Einstein and he had many heated arguments over this) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_interpretation The problem here is that the mathematical models are not mechanical explanations. [more …]

PhysicsComments Off on How radiation transmits inertia from one body to another

Sep182010

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/equivME/#1.1 Let us now consider two such gas samples S1 and S2 that are spaced some distance apart in a vacuum. Let us further suppose that all of the energy ΔE emitted by S1 is absorbed by S2. In this configuration, the mass M1 of S1 will decrease by an amount ΔE/c2. As S2 absorbs [more …]

http://circlon-theory.com/HTML/EmcFallacies.html What is energy? What is mass? How are they related? Does energy have mass? Is mass really ever converted to energy? Actually, mass is a form of energy, called inertia. What do we mean by “form” of energy? How many “forms” of energy are there? — There is this idea that inertial-mass-energy (matter) is [more …]

It is common to think that objects attract each other by their gravitational force. That is to say that most people have this idea that a massive body like the earth pulls on other massive bodies like the moon through some invisible force that we call gravity. When we imagine this, we imagine perhaps an [more …]

What is a fundamental? Something that is not derived. Something that cannot be explained in terms of something else. For example, our understanding holds the following to be fundamentals: mass, length, time, energy, force, charge… We have trouble really understanding these, because understanding is done through analogy and definitions. Normal definitions are based upon deeper [more …]

Perhaps one of my favorite opening paragraphs to a book… There is a theory in physics that explains, at the deepest level, nearly all of the phenomena that rule our daily lives. It summarizes everything we know about the fundamental structure of matter and energy. It provides a detailed picture of the basic building blocks [more …]

“You ask me if an ordinary person, by studying hard, can get to imagine these things like I image them? Of course! I was an ordinary person who studied hard. There’s no miracle, people. It just happens, they got interested in this thing and they learned all this stuff. They’re just people. There’s no talent, [more …]

PhysicsComments Off on God is the Machine (Digital Physics, Quantum Computation)

Jun112010

God is the Machine http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.12/holytech_pr.html — Seth Lloyd This paper proposes a method of unifying quantum mechanics and gravity based on quantum computation. In this theory, fundamental processes are described in terms of pairwise interactions between quantum degrees of freedom. The geometry of space-time is a construct, derived from the underlying quantum information processing. The [more …]

http://www.ru.nl/hfml/research/levitation/diamagnetic/ In fact, it is possible to magnetically levitate every material and every living creature on the earth due to the always present molecular magnetism. The molecular magnetism is very weak (millions times weaker than ferromagnetism) and usually remains unnoticed in everyday life, thereby producing the wrong impression that materials around us are mainly nonmagnetic. [more …]

Drop a ball on the floor and watch what happens. The ball bounces a few times and eventually comes to rest. But we know that there is a law called the conservation of energy, which means that the motion of the ball falling cannot be lost, it can only be transferred. So after the ball [more …]

Now, you may say that this is all metaphorical, to say that this thing is actually another, and you would be absolutely right. Metaphor is exactly that: an expression that equates two seemingly different things. In other words, mathematics. The equations of physics that describe the universe are metaphors that tell us that this equals that. E=MC2 is the mathematical metaphor that tells is that matter IS energy. We know that space is not separate from time, and yet we speak of time as if it flows through space. This is not correct. Neither is it correct to speak of light and radio as if these are two different phenomena. They are not.

Hawking: The Beginning of Time Quantum theory introduces a new idea, that of imaginary time. Imaginary time may sound like science fiction, and it has been brought into Doctor Who. But nevertheless, it is a genuine scientific concept. One can picture it in the following way. One can think of ordinary, real, time as a [more …]

Gauss said that if the truth of this formula is not immediately apparent to you, you will never be a top notch mathematician.

Even for those of us who do not immediately see the truth of this formula, we can nevertheless recognize the breathtaking beauty of an equation that relates so many fundamentals: zero, one, addition, multiplication, exponents, pi, i, and e. Truly staggering! And here’s a video explaining it…

Quantum Entanglement is THE mystery in physics. Entanglement is the thing that makes the quantum world, “different”. It is what is behind the two slit paradox. This is what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.” Of all the things in particle physics for which there are no explanations, entanglement is the biggest. If it [more …]

Sometimes when I am having trouble visualizing something, I find that it is the words themselves that fail me. Perhaps a word is too embedded in a concept that just doesn’t fit. This is especially true of words we use very frequently, but whose concepts are anything but well-understood. “Light”, “energy”, “force”, and “gravity” are [more …]

Richard Feynman is a great popularizer of physics. He mastered the mathematics of light and wrote the QED, which is the most accurate and detailed description of the behavior of light, which is accessible to a lay audience. The following links are to a series of videos on You Tube. Similar to Six Easy Pieces, [more …]

Everyone knows Albert Einstein’s famous equation, but do you know why he was awarded the Nobel Prize? It was not for Relativity, but for giving birth to the Quantum Universe, which is in direct conflict with the Relative Universe! … Thanks to QED we know that all known physical phenomena in the universe from the [more …]

The one thing you have to always remember is that every interaction in the universe is the result of physical touch. All of our senses are touch. One physical thing touching another. There is no force outside of this. There is only one object touching another object.

Even our sight is nothing more than our experience of the physical objects of the world emitting photons (which are physical particles) which then physically touch and are absorbed by the electrons in our retinas. Even sight is touch.

“Ever the winds blow; ever the grass grows. Every day, men and women, conversing, beholding and beholden. The scholar is he of all men whom this spectacle most engages.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The American Scholar"

The practice of Centering Prayer is basically a waiting upon God with loving attentiveness, fulfilling the Gospel injunction, “Watch and Pray.” If one can accept the notion of prayer as primarily relationship with God, it becomes obvious that one’s relationship with God can be expressed without words, simply by a gesture or even by one’s silent intention to consent to God’s presence.

"What amazed and upset him most of all was that the majority of people of his age and circle, who had replaced their former beliefs, as he had, with the same new beliefs as he had, did not see anything wrong with it and were perfectly calm and content. So that, besides the main question, Levin was tormented by other questions: Are these people sincere? Are they not pretending? Or do they not understand somehow differently, more clearly, than he the answers science gives to the questions that concerned him? And he diligently studied both the opinions of these people and the books that expressed these answers." - Tolstoy, "Anna Karenina"

"They do not covet truth, but victory and the dispelling of their own doubts. What they defend is some system, that is, some view about the totality of things, of which men are actually ignorant. No system would ever have been framed if people had been simply interested in knowing what is true, whatever it may be.” - George Santayana

“The old grey donkey stood by himself in a thistly corner of the Forest… and thought sadly to himself, “Why?” and sometimes he thought, “Wherefore?” and sometimes he thought, “Inasmuch as which?” and sometimes he didn’t quite know what he was thinking about.” — Eeyore